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Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Another
spooky film about how flimsy and corrupt western capitalism is at the top
levels, those megalithic banking corporations that control everyone’s money and
who always start what they like to call “investor panic”, when it’s really just
the pros themselves making all the panic moves to cover their own assets.

This story
involves massive layoffs at the trading floor of a major unnamed banking
corporation. As one departs, he tells an underling he was working on something
big and to be careful; the the junior risk analyst checks it out, the ripples
become immediate and far-reaching.

Stanley
Tucci is the laid off analyst, who unfortunately doesn't have a large enough part here. Dr. Spock look-alike Zachary Quinto (Star Trek) is the junior analyst whose work starts the whole cookie crumbling. Simon Baker (British accent and hair and all) is miscast as a division head bereft
of any ethics. Jeremy Irons is credible, though untaxed, as the CEO of the
entire corporation, who is, of course, self-serving and short-sighted. Demi
Moore is perfect in a small part that added little to the story other than a
female actor. Kevin Spacey is seeming a little tired in his too familiar part, as a experience trading group manager, a long time corporate employee with a little conscience remaining, since he came from the old school.

This
repeating mistake usually involves someone big basically admitting all the “paper”
they’re holding is generally worthless, whether it’s corporate bonds,
mortgages, credit swaps, derivatives, and other worthless stuff they seem to
invent daily while the feds look the other way - so they decide they have to
start dumping theirs, and anything else they're holding, before everyone else does, and salvage what they can in the ensuing debacle.

This is
sadly the recurring story of western capitalism: people with too much
concentrated money and therefore financial power start taking too much risk for
the amount of actual money they have. When they either collapse or start
liquidating everything, it has ripple effects throughout all financial markets
and millions of people lost trillions in wealth in a few hours. For some
reason, this sort of sociopathic insanity is not only endorsed but seems to be allowed
to control of nearly every western economy – or more accurately, has gained
control of every western economy.

This version
of the inner workings of high finance will be boring to many, but I found it
quite riveting and totally credible. It is rumored to be the story of Merrill Lynch, who basically became bankrupt and was turned over to Bank of America for resurrection. (We don't allow corporate failures, just millions of individual ones by average citizens).

This story has happened far too often in my lifetime of 60 years. After awhile, you realize this is the scam. You extract as much money as you can from a corporation, then declare bankruptcy. If you an figure out a self-sustaining scam, you'll succeed longer - but remember that the world first corporation, The Dutch East India Trading Company (who are the 'bad guys' in the Pirates of the Caribbean series), also declared bankrupcty after years of success, so the pattern and con is as old as the first time it was pulled off. It's the oldest grift in the west and legal if you can get away with it.

First time director J.C. Chandor(left) won seven
awards for this, and received an Oscar nomination for screenplay directly for
the screen (it lost to Woody’s Midnight in Paris). For a debut film, this is
quite professional, and bodes well for the films of Chandor’s to follow.

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Florian H. von Donnersmarck, 2007, Germany (9.2*) Best Foreign Film (AA, BAA) One of only five films to win both the U.S. and British acad...

The World's Best Films site is more about lists of films by genre, awards, Oscar snubs, and some articles, while this site will display capsule minute reviews of each film, with labels organized so they can be grouped by director, year, country, genre, or rating.

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These are the individual film reviews of what I'm considering the best 1000 dvds available, whether they are films, miniseries, or live concerts. Rather than rush out all 1000 at once, I'm doing them over time to allow inclusion of new releases - in fact, 2008 has the most of any year so far, 30 titles in all; that was a very good year for films, one of the best ever.

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